Thursday, 8 December 2016

ISIS in the Caribbean

ISIS in the Caribbean

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq.
In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS
foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to
accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi,
recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born
into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is
from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country
more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.”
Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned
his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no
honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the
disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage
jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their
own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

For well over a year and a half now, Raqqa, the so-called stronghold of the Islamic State in Syria, has been subjected to sustained aerial bombardment by U.S., French, and Russian war planes. In recent months, the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition has reportedly killed more than 10,000 ISIS fighters, including key figures among ISIS’s leadership, most notably its senior strategist and spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani. It has also launched an offensive, now in its second month, on the group’s Iraqi capital of Mosul. According to estimates
by American officials, ISIS has lost about 45 percent of its territory
in Syria and 20 percent in Iraq since it rose to prominence in the
summer of 2014.

At the same time, the flow of foreign fighters to the
caliphate has plummeted,
from a peak of 2,000 crossing the Turkey-Syria border each month in
late 2014 to as few as 50 today. Yet still there are people making the
long and precarious 6,000-mile journey from Trinidad to Syria in an effort to live there. Just three days before the release of Dabiq 15, eight were detained in southern Turkey, attempting to cross into ISIS-controlled territory in Syria. All were female, and they included children.
In a recent paper in the journal Studies in Conflict and Terrorism,
John McCoy and W. Andy Knight posit that between 89-125 Trinidadians—or
Trinis, to use the standard T&T idiom—have joined ISIS. Roodal
Moonilal, an opposition Member of Parliament in T&T, insists that
the total number is considerably higher, claiming
that, according to a leaked security document passed on to him, over
400 have left since 2013. Even the figure of 125 would easily place
Trinidad, with a population of 1.3 million, including 104,000 Muslims,
top of the list of Western countries with the highest rates of
foreign-fighter radicalization; it’s by far the largest recruitment hub
in the Western Hemisphere, about a four and a half hour flight from the
U.S. capital.How did this happen?

* * *

In a 1986 travelogue essay about Saint Lucia, a Caribbean island north of Trinidad, the British novelist Martin Amis described
the place, condescendingly, as “both beautiful and innocuous, like its
people.” “Even at its most rank and jungly,” he continued, “St Lucia has
a kiddybook harmlessness.” This is all very far from Trinidad, where
away from the tourist spots at Maracas beach and the Queen’s Park Oval
Cricket ground, you can feel an edge and menace on the streets,
especially after dark.
On the night I arrived in St. Augustine, a town in the northwest, there was a double murder. The number of murders for the year was already 77, and it was still only February. This was unprecedented, even for Trinidad, where the “overall crime and safety situation” is currently rated
by the U.S. State Department as “critical,” with 420 murders in 2015.
By late June, when I made a second trip to the island, the number of
murders for 2016 had soared to 227, a 15 percent increase on the 196 murders over the same period in 2015. Last month, on November 11, it reached 400.

In 2011, the government declared a state of emergency,
in response to a wave of violent crime linked to drug trafficking and
intelligence reports warning of an assassination plot against the
then-Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar and senior members of her cabinet. At-Trinidadi, along with several others, was detained on suspicion of colluding in the alleged plot. In Dabiq, at-Trinidadi, alludes to this, but denies any involvement. “That would have been an honor for us to attempt,” he acknowledged,
“but the reality of our operations was much smaller.” He also credited a
Muslim scholar named Ashmead Choate as a formative spiritual influence.
Choate, a fellow Trini and former principal of the Darul Quran Wal Hadith Islamic School in Freeport, central Trinidad, reportedly left for Syria between 2012 and 2013, taking his family with him. According to at-Trinidadi’s testimony in Dabiq, Choate, who was detained alongside him during the state of emergency, was killed fighting in Ramadi, Iraq.Trinidad is “the only country in the Western Hemisphere that has had an actual Islamic insurrection.”
The last state of emergency in T & T was declared in 1990, when, on July 27, a group of black Muslims, the Jamaat al Muslimeen,
stormed into the nation’s Parliament in the capital city of Port of
Spain and tried to overthrow the government, shooting then-Prime
Minister Arthur Robinson and taking members of his cabinet hostage.
Around the same time, another group of Muslimeen gunmen forced their way
into the studio of the nation’s only TV station. At 6:30 p.m. the
Muslimeen’s leader Yasin Abu Bakr came on television and announced
that the government was overthrown. This was premature: Six days later,
the Muslimeen surrendered, and the government regained control. But
history was made.

As Harold Trinkunas of the Brookings Institution
remarked to The Miami Herald, Trinidad is “the only country in the Western Hemisphere that has had an actual Islamic insurrection.”
In a telling comment his Dabiq
interview, at-Trinidadi references this cataclysm in T&T’s recent
history, alluding to “a faction of Muslims in Trinidad,” who “attempted
to overthrow the disbelieving government but quickly surrendered,
apostatized, and participated in the religion of democracy,
demonstrating that they weren’t upon the correct methodology of jihad.”
In Trinidad, the Muslimeen is widely excoriated as a “militant” group,
yet it is instructive that at-Trinidadi condemns it for not being
militant enough, and for not practicing the right kind of Islam.

* * *

The Islamic scene on the island is divided: There is the Indo Islam of the East Indians,
who first came to Trinidad in the mid-19th century as indentured
slaves, and there is the Islam of the Jamaat al Muslimeen, whose
members, many of whom were formerly Christians, are almost exclusively
black. These two groups do not tend to mix, still less intermarry. But
both, in their different ways, are far from the Salafi Islam that the
Trinidadian criminologist Daurius Figueira believes has infiltrated
T&T. Figueira, who is Muslim, has written widely on drug trafficking
in the Caribbean and, more recently, on the jihadist ideologues Abu Muhammad Al-Maqdisi and Anwar al-Awlaki.

He
attributes the growth of Salafism on the island to Saudi proselytizing.
“They’ve spent money and brought in all these Wahhabi scholars from
Mecca,” he told me when I visited him. “They’ve passed on the doctrine,
then they’ve started to take the young males and send them to Mecca, and
then they come back to Mecca and they continue, so now you don’t even
need to send missionaries again.” The most visible sign of this
infiltration, he said, is the full hijab: Before the Saudis’
missionaries came, Muslim women in Trinidad didn’t wear it, but now he
said it’s relatively commonplace. Figueira was keen to dissociate the
Jamaat al Muslimeen from the militant Salafis whom he believes are
sympathetic to ISIS. “If you have any understanding of the Jamaat al
Muslimeen,” Figueira said, “you’ll understand that Islamic State will
have nothing to do with them because the Muslimeen does not pass the
test by Islamic State to be a Salafi jihadi organization.”
In a research paper on the Jamaat al Muslimeen, published in the British Journal of Criminology,
the sociologist Cynthia Mahabir describes how the Muslimeen, after
1990, transformed itself from an idealistic social movement—“a
fraternity of ‘revolutionary men of Allah’”—into an criminal enterprise,
or “Allah’s outlaws,” to use the title of Mahabir’s paper. Figueira
puts it like this: “Yasin [Abu Bakr] would never get involved with
Islamic State and recruit [people] and send them to Syria, because it’s
bad for business! They [are] on a hustle, they’re hustlers, they looking
for a living.” According to the analyst Chris Zambelis, this hustle has
allegedly involved “gangland-style slayings, narcotics and arms trafficking, money laundering, extortion, kidnapping, and political corruption.”
On
the two occasions when I was in Trinidad earlier this year I tried to
meet Yasin Abu Bakr, but he was unable to see me. However, I did meet
his urbane and charming son, Fuad, who leads a political party called New National Vision.
Fuad, who has inherited his father’s height and striking looks, showed
me around the Muslimeen compound on the outskirts of Port of Spain. He
spoke of his father with great warmth and affection, describing him as
“a genuinely good person” who has spent his life defending the underdog
and fighting injustice.

From what I’d read
about the compound, I had expected to see Abu Bakr’s scowling security
detail policing the joint, but they were nowhere to be seen. Instead,
while I was waiting outside in the carpark with my noticeably nervous
East Indian cab-driver, who remained inside his locked and glacially
air-conditioned car, I was surveilled by a group of giggling girls, no
more than 7 or 8 years old, from an Islamic school on the site. The
compound was quiet, and has clearly seen better days. “This place was
full, it was a community, people lived here, people were coming in
droves,” Fuad said, referring to the period just before the attempted
coup in 1990. (Afterward, the group declined due to internal feuds and
law enforcement’s massive curtailing of their activities.) He also spoke
wistfully of a period of “communal living, even community justice.” “If
you had an issue, you came to the imam, and he would send his guys and
they would sort it out.”Tentatively,
I asked Fuad about ISIS and whether there were recruiters in T&T
working for the group. According to local news reports,
the recruitment hubs are located in Rio Claro in the southeast and
Chaguanas in central Trinidad. “Listen,” he said, “there are
facilitators, people who are there [in Syria], they communicate to
friends. Trinidad is small and the Muslim community is even smaller, so
it’s basically friends, people you know, who are saying to you, ‘you
know, do you want to come?’ No big, bad recruiter.”

Yet this not quite
the picture I received from one source within the Ministry of National
Security, who said there was one particular imam playing the role of
“big, bad recruiter.”How were so many able to leave Trinidad to join ISIS? Nobody was stopping them.The
source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Trinis who had
gone to Syria since the outbreak of the civil war included an entire
community of Muslims from Diego Martin, a small town north of Port of
Spain. “An entire community,” he repeated. He also claimed that
some leavers had received military training in Trinidad before they
left. “There is mujahideen training, or there has been mujahideen
training going on in T&T, since about 2007. I was made aware of that
in 2009.” He received this information, he said, from a trusted
confidant from within the Muslim community, and added that it wasn’t the
Muslimeen, but a more radical faction of Salafis that had splintered
from them. I had heard this rumor many times when I was in Trinidad, but
this was the first time I’d heard it from a source within the security
services. Mark Bassant, an investigative TV journalist in Trinidad, also
suspects that some of those who have gone to Syria have undergone weapons training in Trinidad.

* * *

When, in the summer of 1498,
Christopher Columbus approached the shores of Trinidad, he would have
been struck by the richness of the island, with its tropical climate,
flowering vegetation, flashing birds, rivers and waterfalls. For more
recent visitors, who reach the island by air, it is the richness of
Trini culture, vividly exemplified in its annual carnival in February.
To outsiders, Trinidad can look like a paradise. But for those many
Trinis who are blighted by its high crime rate, rising unemployment,
pockets of abject poverty and endemic corruption this proposition is
routinely put to the test. This may explain why Islam, with its call to
end corruption and oppression and to return to a simpler, more just
society, appeals to so many of those from whom Trinidad’s myriad
blessings are withheld. But this doesn’t get us any closer to
understanding why so many Trinis have been captivated by the brutal and
hallucinatory Islam of ISIS.
A more immediate question, and one
that’s easier to answer, is how so many were able to leave Trinidad to
join ISIS. The answer to this is that they were allowed to. Nobody was
stopping them.

In fact, this was state policy. It was state policy when
the conflict first started in Syria, in 2011, and it is still
state policy in late 2016. As Roodal Moonilal flatly explained to me,
over a drink in the Hyatt in downtown Port of Spain, “ISIS is not
proscribed in T&T, meaning that you can go and train with ISIS for
2-3 years and come back here with all the rights and privileges of a
citizen of T&T.”Gary
Griffith, who served as Minister of National Security between September
2013 and February 2015, told me, when we met earlier this year, that
his “concern as Minster of National Security was not them [fighters from
T&T] going across—they were free to go across, if they wanted—my
concern was to ensure that they do not come back.” Griffith is
particularly critical of his successor and political opponent Edmund
Dillon, for what he sees as Dillon’s evasiveness in dealing with the
issue of returnees from Syria. Griffith, by contrast, is emphatic: “They
should not be allowed re-entry. … If they know that it’s a one-way
ticket to hell, that is the ultimate deterrent.” He also expressed
indignation that his own proposal to create “a counter-terrorism
intelligence unit” for monitoring terrorist threats, launched when he
was minister, was blocked by the current government. Dillon, he said,
has “a good heart and means well.”

But “he’s burying his head in the
sand. He thinks God is a Trini.” Dillon did not respond to my numerous
requests for comment. In addition to turning a blind eye to ISIS
recruitment, the current government has done little to challenge the
spread of Salafi Islam in in the country. Moonilal believes that this,
more than derailing ISIS recruitment networks, is the greatest security
challenge facing T&T. Yet there are few signs that it will be taken
up any time soon.
“We have beautiful sunshine, we have oil and
other natural resources, arable land, we have a blessed country,” Fuad
Abu Bakr told me. But it evidently wasn’t enough for at-Trinidadi. A
woman identifying herself as his mother told the Trinidad Express that, since he left, “His life is better. He has purpose.”​